Full text of author Ruben Meerman’s talk: How Breathing and Metabolism Are Interconnected at TEDxBundaberg conference. In this talk, Ruben shares his knowledge on how to breathe yourself thin by explaining where fat goes when you lose weight.
TRANSCRIPT:
Ruben Meerman – Author of Big Fat Myths
About seven years ago, I saw this photo of myself and decided that I had to do something about this thing.
So I ate less food, moved around a bit more, and lo and behold, this happened. I lost 16 kilograms.
And you’re probably wondering: How did he do it?
But I was wondering: Where did the 16 kilograms go?
And I’ve been infatuated with this question ever since. I ended up publishing a paper about it in the British Medical Journal, very brief paper — 850 words, two figures.
And then, I published a book about it, which was no bestseller because it told you that you had to eat less and move more to lose weight. No one wants to hear that.
But it’s now a first-year subject at the University of New South Wales, and so I better explain that I did not figure out where fat goes when you lose weight. That was done a long time ago.
In fact, here’s some time posts for you. When Captain Cook sailed past Bundaberg in 1770, we didn’t know what happens to fat when you lose weight.
But when the First Fleet sailed into Sydney Cove, we did know the answer, and it was all figured out by this bloke in between. His name’s Antoine Lavoisier. He figured out that respiration is a combustion. You turn food into carbon dioxide and water. And in the process, nothing is lost.
Nothing is created. Everything is just transformed.
And so, what did I do?
Well, when I lost weight and I first thought about this, I was so infatuated.
But it turns out that when you lose weight, 8.4 kilos out of every 10 comes out of your lungs, which I think is the best fact I’ve ever heard, so I gave — you’ve got to add oxygen to do this, so you can’t do it (snap) like that. It takes a while.
So I gave a talk about this at TEDxQUT a long time ago now, and then I did a story for ABC TV Catalyst, and I met this fellow, Professor Andrew Brown, who teaches biochemistry. And I showed him my calculations, and he said, “That’s pretty interesting. Let’s try and get that published.”
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And so he helped me get it into the British Medical Journal.
And the other thing we did was we surveyed 150 doctors, dieticians and personal trainers and asked them what they thought. And here’s the thing: what they think happens is impossible. You can’t turn fat into energy, because it’s made of atoms. And you would need antimatter atoms to annihilate them.
So that’s literally impossible.
And since then, I’ve realized, well, hang on, this is part of a much bigger gap in health literacy. I’ve asked literally thousands of kids this question: When you breathe in, what are you inhaling? Oxygen.
And what are you exhaling? Carbon dioxide.
What they don’t realize is that they’re breathing in atoms, and two go in, but three come out. And it’s this atom here that is the gap in health literacy. It’s also the secret to weight loss because it means that your exhaled breath is heavier than your inhaled breath.
And when you ask around, so few people know this. Well, have a listen to these people:
(Video clip:
Ruben Meerman: What’s the gas that you inhale in out of the air that keeps you alive called? Oxygen.
Oxygen.
And what’s the gas you breathe out because you’re alive? Carbon dioxide? Carbon dioxide?
Now third question. Where did the carbon atoms in the carbon dioxide come from? Oh … I don’t know.
No idea.
I’ve got no idea.
I wouldn’t have a clue, mate.
Ooh, ahhhh.
Ummmm, wow! Good question.
I should have concentrated more in chemistry.
So where do carbon atoms come from? Or … Umm, pollution? Fumes? Gas? Cars and stuff? I don’t know. Yeah. Vehicles. Don’t know. Cow poop? Should know, but don’t know.
So to be somewhere in the body, right? Out of my lungs. My lungs? From the environment? From your blood stream? From living things? Maybe from the blood? From plants? My chemistry days are over. I’ve got nothing. From the food we eat?
You know that! You got there! Really? So you eat it.
Yeah We eat it? From what?
Have you heard of carbohydrates?
Yes.
Oh, yes. Oh, OK.
What do you think the carbo bit means?
Carbon dioxide.
Probably carbon dioxide? Does it connect to somewhere?
Like carbon and hydrogen and oxygen together?
Yes!
Carbon – carbohydrate, yeah. It’s not the same word.
Never thought. It’s C-H-A. Carbon-hydrogen. OK, interesting.
What do you do for a crust? I’m a PDH PE teacher.
…Video clip ends.)
This is not a gap in health literacy. This is a gaping black hole in health literacy. And the amazing thing is we supposedly learned all this stuff at school. We learned all the dots, but no one ever teaches you how to connect them.
So the word carbohydrates is the big clue, and that’s because it stands for carbon atoms that have been hydrated by — well, if you’re dehydrated, you need to drink water. And water has a chemical formula, which stands for a bunch of atoms.
So where do these carbohydrates that you eat come from? I mean what is this stuff? And it all starts in plants.
So Step 1 in making carbohydrates is plants suck water out of the soil. They take the water molecules, stick it into a molecule called chlorophyll, you’ve all heard of. It takes a photon of sunlight to zap that bond and zap that bond, and now we have the atoms free.
You do that twice, and you’ve got enough atoms now to make an oxygen molecule, which is the waste product of photosynthesis. And by the way, you breathe that stuff.
So every oxygen molecule you inhale came from two water molecules.
Step 2 is to take carbon dioxide out of the air into the leaf, and into a chemical process, which is called the Calvin cycle. And if you get six carbon atoms and stick them together, you can make glucose, which is the most important carbohydrate in the cosmos.
If you rearrange those atoms, then you can make fructose, which is what sugarcane does, which I have a stalk of over there. And if you stick it in sunlight, it will turn carbon dioxide and water into sugar.
If you stick glucose to fructose, you get table sugar, and if you stick galactose to glucose, you get another famous disaccharide. It’s called lactose.
If you’re lactose intolerant, you can’t break the bonds between this oxygen atom and its neighbors. So all of this stuff is understandable if you know about atoms, and it all starts in plants.
But you don’t just eat carbohydrates. So here’s everything that you eat, all the macronutrients. We’ve looked at carbs. Here’s fats. The three most common fatty acids in nature… palmitic acid gets its name from palm oil, oleic from olive oil. There’s only three atoms there though. Three kinds. Three elements.
And if you stick those three fatty acids to a glycerin molecule, you’ll make a triglyceride. This is what olive oil is; this is what every fat in nature is. It’s the fat in your fat cells that you want to lose if you’re trying to lose weight.
And when you burn it, what you’re really doing is turning it into carbon dioxide and water. You call it metabolism. People say they’re burning fat. It means you’re turning it into carbon dioxide and water. And there’s two ways to do it.
The main highway is called the beta oxidation pathway, but there’s another way called the ketogenic pathway, and the low-carb people will be all over this. It’s taking fatty acids and turning them into smaller molecules — acetyl acetate — which can then be turned into acetone, and beta hydroxybutarate.
But the point is you still add oxygen and it still turns into carbon dioxide and water, so it doesn’t matter what kind of diet you’re on. If you’re burning fat, you’re turning it into CO2 and H2O.
And alcohol is made of the same three atoms. Protein is an interesting one. It’s made out of 20 kinds of amino acids, but there’s only two more kinds of atoms.
So for all their complexity, there’s only five elements. And if you eat them – well, let’s take a look. Because to make a human, you need those 20 amino acids. All the protein in nature is made out of these 20 amino acids. A baby, a human, is 60% water, 16% protein, 19% fat and 5% a bit of other stuff.
And when you burn protein, if you eat a lot of it, you can’t store it. So you’ll burn it, and you’ll turn it into carbon dioxide and water, a bit of urea and some sulfate. Those two things will end up in the toilet via your bladder, and now you know where everything that you eat goes.
You might be wondering, though, “I’m eating carbon, hydrogen, oxygen. What’s all this talk about diets?”
Amazingly, this junk diet is also made of nothing but carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, but you’re not getting many vitamins and minerals. So let’s take a look at those.
Here’s all 14 vitamins that you need to eat. If you don’t eat them, you’ll get scurvy, beriberi rickets – you’ll go blind.
But the amazing thing is per day, you only need about half a gram of this stuff. The 14 elements that you have to take, we call them minerals. Here they are. These are the recommended daily intakes, and if you stick all that together, it’s seven grams worth of stuff. It’s not very much. That’s why we call them micronutrients.
So when I tell people this, the first question I get asked is “So what? I just have to breathe more?” And they’ll start hyperventilating.
So let’s talk about breathing.
Talk to anyone who works in an ICU unit, and they’ll tell you that a human who’s lying perfectly still needs 3.5 millilitres of oxygen, and 2.6 to 2.9 millilitres of CO2 will come out of them per kilogram of that person.
Now, I weigh 72 kilos, so that means I need about 252 millilitres of oxygen just to stay alive. That’s 15 litres per hour, and over here, I have an hour’s worth of breathing. This is how much air I have to breathe just to get that one balloon of oxygen into my bloodstream. A balloon is about 15 litres.
So that’s how much oxygen I need per hour just to stay awake and alive — not awake, sorry — I mean alive. It’s my resting metabolic rate. And in that hour, when I breathe all this air back out again, it’ll have a balloon worth of CO2 in it, and these numbers just get better and better and better.
If you add up all the carbon atoms in that much CO2, it’s 136 to 151 grams a day of just carbon. It’s about a kilo a week. It’s about 49 to 55 kilos a year.
If you want to lose weight, don’t eat that much carbon back in. That’s the whole key to breathing yourself thin. Doctors will — if you are not breathing, they will monitor your breathing.
If you’re having an operation, the anaesthetist will look for your breaths. This is how much CO2 there should be in your breath. If you hyperventilate, your body is not producing more CO2.
You’re just breathing out more than you need to, and so this will happen. You’re pumping out more than you’re making; the amount in your body will go down. It’s called hypocapnia. It will lead to a loss of consciousness if you do it for too long.
And some people ask me: “What about people who have COPD or emphysema? Could they get overweight because they can’t get rid of enough CO2?”
Well, they can’t do the Calvin Cycle — a plant can — so you can’t turn the CO2 that you’re not breathing out back into fat. It’s impossible. So, you know, there’s a lot of misconceptions about this business.
Now, it takes a while to breathe out the carbon that you eat. So let’s have a look at how much carbon you can put in really quickly. I quite like this stuff, and there is a lot of sugar in lemon-flavored soft drink. It’s one of the highest.
So, how much sugar are we talking about? Well, one stick is 3 grams, so there’s 23 and a third of a stick in there, which looks like this.
And if you want to turn that much sugar into carbon dioxide and water, well, it’s going to take a while. You’re going to need to breathe in that much oxygen. You’ll make that much CO2.
How much is that? It’s four balloons worth. And it’s four balloons’ worth of CO2.
So, how long is it going to take me to breathe out that much carbon? It’s going to take me four hours because I only breathe out one balloon of carbon dioxide per hour if I stay still, but if I go for a walk, I’ll breathe it out in an hour. If I run, it’ll only take me 30 minutes. That’s why they say eat less, move more.
Because when you’re moving more, you’re breathing more. And there’s always CO2 in your breath.
What about if we compare it to something a bit healthier?
Because this has got vitamins and amino acids and all the good stuff in it. But if we take those ingredients, and we chuck it into the equation for food, then you discover that, actually, it’s four hours as well.
And so is this tuna salad sandwich on organic wholemeal bread, grown on the north side of the hill, blessed by a monk, all the things. But it’s still four hours of breathing, right?
So the point is they’re not equivalent in how healthy they are, but they are equivalent in how long they take to exhale. An apple takes an hour; a fun size chocolate bar, an hour, 10 minutes; regular size, 3.5 hours; and a king-sized, 5.25.
If you’re trying to lose weight, don’t drink soft drink, because that’s got carbon atoms in it. Drink water.
If you like this stuff — and who doesn’t? — a large coffee and a piece of cake. That’s 10 hours of breathing between breakfast and lunch. So be careful. A large, lovely burger like this guy — 7 hours. Have a large fries with it, 13 hours; large drink, 16 hours; bang in a large sundae – it’s a whole day worth of breathing.
You can see why there’s an obesity epidemic, but no one knows what really is going on in their body. So, usually, we talk about calories in, calories out.
How’s this information going to help you?
Well, I would like to talk about atoms in, atoms out. And when you’re counting calories, you’re actually counting carbon atoms because the energy in food is wherever you see a carbon and a hydrogen atom stuck together. And it’s in all food.
So just — and it’s sunlight that put that there. So my project that I really want to get up and running here at Bundaberg is let’s teach your children this, and you can do it.
Little kids love learning about atoms. Adults freak out at the idea. But little kids absolutely love it. This is Ithaca Creek State School in Brisbane. This is a school in India, and these kids are using amino, and they’re making amino acids and sticking them together to build a protein.
You can do that with amazing resource that my friend Ian Stewart invented. They’re called “sticky atoms”. He’s a retired physics and chemistry teacher. He taught in Brisbane. They have magnetic bonds so three-year-olds, even younger, can play with these things and learn about atoms.
And for the educators in the room, they conform to the concrete pictorial abstract way of teaching. It’s a fantastic pedagogy, and Ian and I are hoping to work together. We took this out backstage, just moments ago.
Because what we want to do is teach children what’s actually going on in their bodies. And you can’t do that if you’re not talking about the atoms that they’re made of.
Unfortunately, the curriculum does not introduce the concept of atoms and molecules until kids are in Grade 9, and they don’t see the periodic table until they’re in Grade 10.
Why? Because a fellow called Jean Piaget, who was kind of a contemporary of Freud. He thought that kids can’t have these abstract thoughts until they’re about 14. We don’t use Freud’s psychology anymore. We still learn it, but we don’t use it.
But our curriculum is still under the spell of a person who died long ago, whose ideas about education were, well, someone had to have those ideas, but they were wrong.
So I hope to see what happens if kids grow up with this knowledge. In 10 years, what do obesity rates look like in a town like Bundaberg if all the children learn this at primary school? Will they grow up to accept the advice that to lose weight, just eat less, move more and keep breathing?
Thank you.
For Further Reading:
Ruben Meerman Discusses the Mathematics of Weight Loss at TEDxQUT Transcript
Intermittent Fasting: Transformational Technique by Cynthia Thurlow
Winning The Mental Battle of Physical Fitness and Obesity: Ogie Shaw (Transcript)
The Fear of Fat – The Real Elephant in the Room by Kelli Jean Drinkwater (Transcript)
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